


Home Again

by flutter



Category: Xena: Warrior Princess
Genre: Gen, Ghosts, Home, Returning Home, Sad, bereaved, greater good
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-10-13
Updated: 2005-10-13
Packaged: 2017-11-12 02:24:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/485646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flutter/pseuds/flutter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Spoilers for the end of the series regarding Xena's fate.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Home Again

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for the end of the series regarding Xena's fate.

Poteidaia wasn't Poteidaia. Not anymore. What was left of the town was quiet, first of all, and empty. The carts of flowers and vegetables were missing, the townspeople weren't milling about. There was no doubt that those who had lived here either died or moved elsewhere. No one would want to stay where they were not protected, where they were not safe. Gabrielle knew and she understood. It had been years since she considered herself among those who had once lived peacefully here. She understood too that she would not have been welcomed as she was now, just as she had never been entirely welcome when Xena had been by her side.   
  
Her steps were light, so as not to disturb anything. There was no reason for caution, no reason for silence; the town was dead. An acrid smell clung to the air; it reeked of old bloodshed and of death. When she turned to walk a path, one that an ancient part of her self remembered traveling so often, no dust stirred from her shoes on the ground.   
  
_Here is a graveyard_ , she thought; _the dead were not buried, they were absorbed by the roots of what lived, their bones pecked at and carried away._   
  
Her feet carried her to what was left of her family home. The roof, what was not charred from an old fire, appeared brown with rot; it had collapsed and, by some miracle, merely rested on support beams. The front door lay open as though it mocked her return Home, and from behind the door's opening, lived a pitted darkness. The depths of dark grew thicker the further back she attempted to look. Broken only by random, thin shafts of sunlight, the shadows within seemed to breathe, as if all they ever did was wait for an entrance.  
  
Gabrielle studied the shambled frame, noted the cobwebs that hung, ominous and thick. She took a breath of her own before lifting a foot to step inside what had once been a comfort.  
  
When she looked around her, the ceiling reflected no caved roof and the cobwebs had disappeared. A woman grabbed her hands, spun her around as dark hair followed light; a jubilant smile broke out across Gabrielle's sister's face. When they stopped Gabrielle stared, not smiling, not sure if what she was seeing was memory or vision.   
  
"Lila."   
  
"It's good to see you, Gabby. Are you here to stay?"  
  
"No, not to stay. I came to see what happened to the village." Gabrielle watched confusion flicker across her sister's porcelain-skinned face, curiosity fire in her dark eyes.   
  
"The village?"  
  
 _A vision then_.  
  
"I've come to see mother, Lila; I've come to talk with her."  
  
Their mother, Hecuba, as though magic itself conjured her, stood from behind a shabby table, set in front of a fired hearth. She wasn't as dark and fragile as her youngest daughter or as light and strong as her oldest. Instead she was of something else—something that, when torn apart, would prove she was a mixture of both yet not really either one.   
  
Hecuba remained in front of the fire, backlit with an orange glow of flames that should have spread a warmth through the room. Her gaze traveled the height of Gabrielle and she saw with a present eye—as a spirit who sees everything at once might. What she saw—what Gabrielle imagined she saw—was Gabrielle's past and future both but, more so, her present self in need.  
  
"What happened to the girl who wanted to be a Bard," her mother said, an eyebrow raised in question.   
  
"She found another dream," Gabrielle replied, "one that's more important."  
  
"And she thinks being a Bard—telling the truth of the journey—is less important?"   
  
"No, not less important, just something someone else can do."  
  
There was a silence so drawn and ragged that the air shivered around them.  
  
Gabrielle was the first to break it.  
  
"I would rather hold her memory to my chest while I fight for the Greater Good. I would rather accomplish years of good than write stories of others only attempting—"   
  
"So, this is for Xena, is it?"  
  
Gabrielle didn't wince at her name but, instead, watched her mother's face. In it sat eyes that used to hold and soothe the fears of a young girl; she saw herself reflected in them. She saw herself as her mother remembered her: a young girl with a young girl's naivety, the long blonde hair so out of place in a dark haired family, and the fists forever clutching quill and parchment. The last of who she used to be, she could see, was stripped away in her twice-mirrored reflection.   
  
When her mother looked away Gabrielle imagined it was because she finally saw the Warrior she had become rather than the Bard she once was.   
  
"Mother," Gabrielle said as she took a step toward her. "I was a Bard in another life but in it, too, I became an Amazon, a Queen. And in the afterlife I was a Demon and then an Angel. This life, as you see me now, I have become who I was meant to be."   
  
"You were meant to be a killer," her mother said, averting her eyes. There was no question in her mother's voice, only shame and disbelief.  
  
"I was her partner in life; we fought side by side, and with her dea—". A grip on her heart squeezed and Gabrielle fought for a breath.   
  
"With her gone," she continued slowly, "I remain her partner; I'll continue what she began, finish where we left off—"   
  
"I see."  
  
"You don't, and I understand that it's different where you are but here, where I am, it's still a world where Evil attempts to triumph Good every day. With her I battled and fought for the Greater Good. Without Xe—without her, I'll continue to battle and fight. It's a mission worth finishing, a mission worth risking my life for."   
  
Her mother's attention had shifted and Gabrielle began to turn in order to see what had distracted her.   
  
"How did Xena die, Gabrielle," her mother asked.  
  
Gabrielle, distracted with the formality of her mother using her given name and with the tone in which she said it, stopped to look at the woman before her.   
  
The face that focused on hers was not her mother's and yet it was. The eyes were slightly different, slightly brighter, and the room shimmered with a ripple as if once more settling in it's own glamour, own illusion.

  
"We were in Japan," she said. Her jaw grew rigid as the memories broke. "There was an army formed by a spirit named Yodoshi—an evil man she once helped to kill—and lead by a General Morimoto. Morimoto—" she faltered as she remembered the impending battle and its aftermath. The song of arrows blazing through the sky, the swish of metal through the air and the thud of…  
  
Gabrielle closed her eyes, squeezed them.  
  
"She knew and had a plan," she continued. "She knew that she could only fight Yodoshi as a spirit, could only free the spirits imprisoned by him if she were to die. She didn't tell me it would be for good. She didn't—."   
  
"That's quite a head," said her mother's voice, interrupting Gabrielle.   
  
Once again the eyes, no longer her mother's in shape or color, were focused on something else, something above and behind Gabrielle.  
  
"What?" Gabrielle turned and saw what had drawn the strange eyes. She collapsed to the floor, the impact jarring a sob. "Xena…"   
  
A mass of filthy hair, hung dark and limp around a placid face. The hair fell below a neck that, if the cut had been fresh, would have bled crimson. Instead there was a black crust, a mixture of blood and dirt, dried with time; it clung to the skin where the head had been severed from the neck. And from this was a pole—what may have been a thick branch whittled till spherical, sanded till smooth—jutting from the space where the neck should have curved to meet shoulders.   
  
From behind Gabrielle a scrape of metal against wood reverberated. When she turned, the image of her mother began to twist and reshape. It grew taller, thicker, and loomed over the spot where Gabrielle still sat.   
  
Where her mother's breasts had been was now a naked expanse of skin and muscle. The eyes that merely looked odd before were now almond and narrow. The dark, indistinct brown of her mother's hair flattened to an ebony black, straight and pulled back from the face. The face. It too was no longer her mother's. All feminine traces disappeared and, in it's absence, held place for a wide, maniacal grin.  
  
"Morimoto," Gabrielle said, already standing with her sais drawn. Her eyes caught the glint of his sword and the eagerness on his face that begged for bloodshed.  
  
"We have unfinished business, little girl," said Morimoto. His voice found it's way as a whisper in her ear, even as the words raked around the room. The illusion of their surroundings began to slide, melting from a heat that no longer existed. All that was left, Gabrielle saw, when the glamour diminished, was a ruin of her childhood home.   
  
He, too, disappeared with the glamour but Gabrielle understood. Her new life, her next move, would have to begin where Xena's end had been.   
  
"Japan," she said to no one and turned her back on the deepening darkness of someone else's past.


End file.
